Teaching coding is currently gaining momentum across the world to help young people develop technological fluency and deeper understanding of how the digital world is created, how it might be used to meet our needs, how we might repair or modify it. At the same time, the maker movement of independent innovators, designers and tinkerers has dynamically entered the landscape of innovative education and non-formal and informal learning, offering an unprecedented opportunity for educators to advance a progressive educational agenda. Across the spectrum of these emerging creative learning activities, the elements of fun and playfulness are dominant harnessing children’s sense of joy, wonder and natural curiosity, achieving high levels of engagement and learner’s personal investment in learning. The links and contributions of these creative learning approaches and activities to science education are strong and obvious, albeit still only little explored and understood in depth.
The COMnPLAY SCIENCE project aims to help Europe better understand the new ways in which non-formal and informal science learning is taking place through various coding, making, and play activities that young Europeans (children, adolescents and young adults) are nowadays increasingly engaged with, outside school and higher education science classrooms, beyond the formal boundaries of science education.
The project started on the 1st of June 2018, has a 3-year duration and has received 3,1M€ funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Carefully positioning the research within the context of the overarching contemporary discourses on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEAM) education, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and science capital, the project’s main objectives are to:
- Develop an appropriate conceptual and methodological framework integrating all aspects of the project into a unifying conceptual map.
- Setup a European-wide community of stakeholders, including learners, educators, facilitators and policymakers from diverse fields, to contribute, guide and help assessing the conducted research.
- Identify, pool and analyse diverse existing coding, making and play-based practices taking place outside formal science classrooms which bear some promise for non-formal and informal science learning.
- Conduct in-depth learner-centred participatory empirical research on selected practices.
- Gain a deep understanding of the impact that this kind of non-formal and informal science learning has on formal science education, traditional non-formal and informal science learning interventions, young people as learners and citizens, as well as, on society.
- Communicate and disseminate the messages and outcomes of the project widely, and enable the exploitation of the findings of the research through the development of relevant guidance for practitioners and recommendations for policy development and further research.
